


A Life Less Ordinary

by chaletian



Series: In Which The Enterprise Is Like A Village [11]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 03:41:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaletian/pseuds/chaletian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This much is true: facts about life on the Enterprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Life Less Ordinary

1\. The port nacelle can get a little sluggish, particularly during ion storms. Scotty's scoured it from top to bottom, had teams all over it, and still hasn't worked out why. Over the course of the mission, it becomes the status quo, but sleepless late nights still sometimes find him spreadeagled under a console, trying to solve the mystery.

2\. Uhura really likes Kirk. Not _likes_ likes; just likes. He's a good captain, and a good man, and she respects him. Even _after_ that incident on Linus Prime.

3\. The staff in Stellar Cartography like to bitch about finding popcorn everywhere after movie night, but secretly they quite like the cachet of being Enterprise's cinema. Miya encourages the bitching, though, because it gets everyone off the subject of Chekov's crush.

4\. The steam pipe trunk distribution venue is a lie. It's an office, tucked well away, where four yeomen cram in together (as Kirk discovers on his epic journey from bow to stern). On closer enquiry, it's apparently an old, old joke. No one knows where the name comes from. It's just Starfleet tradition.

5\. Spock gets freaked out by cooked eggs. Yeah. No-one saw that one coming. (And, yes, "freaked out" is relative, but after a few years, everyone gets used to interpreting slightly widened eyes.)

6\. Kirk swore if another tribble set foot (or fur) on his ship again, he'd start some kind of ritual slaughter. Of the tribbles, or the crewman responsible, no-one's quite certain. They're pretty sure he's kidding. But not enough to risk it.

7\. Everyone knows Hikaru Sulu is cool. It's an unquestioned fact of life on Enterprise. What they don't know is that sometimes, when it's late and he can't sleep, he re-lives his first attempt at piloting Enterprise. He's glad Kirk wasn't there, but really, really wishes he could say the same for Spock.

8\. Lt Lewis spies on people using the security cameras. Everyone knows, and he says it's part of his job, which is sort of technically true, but still, when a group of crewmen get together for a drink and bitch, he's always the one voted most likely to be a serial killer.

9\. Nurse Chapel has a thing for Spock, which everyone gracefully ignores.

10\. Drinks from the replicators have an odd aftertaste. Lt Bridgerton, in Engineering, has made it her sworn mission to fix it. She never quite does, but by the time they return to Earth, she's one of the authorities on replicator technology.

11\. Chekov knows he gets away with more than other people because of his age and his resemblance to a puppy, which sometimes annoys him but mostly is convenient. It gets less convenient and more annoying as the mission unfolds, and people are treating him like a kid when he's in his twenties and an experienced bridge officer. In some ways, although leaving Enterprise is like tearing a part out of his heart, he's relieved to be assigned to another ship, where he is no longer the youngest, or the cutest, and junior officers and crewmen listen, agog, to his stories of serving under Captain Kirk.

He just wishes the stupid rumours about him and Spock didn't have to come along with him.

12\. Bones misses Earth. He misses his daughter, he misses the smell of blossom on the wind, he misses the crunch of gravel as he walks up to a house, he misses sitting on a porch with lemonade. But he is a doctor first and foremost, and his patients are on Enterprise, and he is surprised to find, one day, that this has become home. He thinks, maybe, unlikely as it seems, that on Earth he would find himself missing the smooth, bright walls of Enterprise, the slightly drunken evenings sitting in the mess after escaping yet another dire calamity, the cool quiet of Sickbay before disaster strikes, the prickly camaraderie between him and Spock, even. Not Winters, though. He'll be damned if he ever misses Winters.

13\. The bunks in the crewmen's quarters are approximately four inches too narrow (there has been an informal poll) to allow comfortable sex. Coincidence or design? Everyone has their suspicions.

14\. Kirk is pretty sure he's not supposed to allow an official bookie on his ship. So he totally doesn't know a thing about Sulu and Chekov and that thing they do. Though he thinks they owe him a cut, given how much money they seem to win over him.

15\. So, there's rank and all that, but after a few years in space, your position on Enterprise is chiefly dictated by whom you play poker with.

16\. Sometimes prank wars get so carried away that Spock has to step in. (Kirk knows better than to try; too many people on Enterprise were at the Academy with him for the hypocrisy to be anything less than overwhelming.) Mostly they carry on at a low level and everyone turns a blind eye.

17\. ~~They all love their jobs.~~ They mostly all love most of their jobs. Hillier got assigned as the ship's hairdresser, which he could do without. Sulu hates warp core diagnostics that leave them put-putting along on thrusters for days on end. Winters loathes everything about being in space. Kirk despaired of all the paperwork until he discovered he could delegate most of it to Yeoman Rand and now she just hands him a padd, he scrawls his signature on it, and they're golden.

18\. Jokes about Admiral Archer's beagle never get old, even when it turns up again.

19\. Jokes about Chekov and Spock never get old, even though everyone knows Spock and Uhura are a couple and Chekov was probably just collecting data.

20\. Jokes about Kirk and Linus Prime never get old (though are never told in the Captain's presence).

21\. Most of the crew would die for Kirk, and for each other. Some of them do.

22\. There is a scorch mark in one of the ancillary rooms off Engineering that is never satisfactorily explained to the decommissioning engineers at Utopia Planitia. Mostly because it's where the still blew up towards the end of their first year out.

23\. Bones is working on a paper to outlaw swords on Starfleet vessels, only marginally hampered by the fact that it keeps mysteriously disappearing off the ship's server.

24\. Kirk loves Enterprise, but would sacrifice her without a second thought for his crew.

25\. They don't all like each other. There are squabbles and feuds and personality clashes, not to mention long drawn-out arguments over pie and whose shift is better in Communications and nebulae and whether Kirk really likes twenty-second century abstract emotionalism and logic and transdimensional beaming and allegedly stolen uniform and sweetcorn and Gaila and any number of things. But after five years, they're definitely – in a weird, 400-strong, dysfunctional kind of way – a family.


End file.
